The Locker Room
by PatheticWhiteSlime
Summary: Relationships always begin in the locker room. FlackLindsay and AdamAngell.
1. Sharing Secrets

Five weeks, three days, two hours, and ten minutes after her big move to New York City, Lindsay Monroe stumbled into the locker room three floors down from the lab where she worked for the NYPD. Mentally blocking out tears, she mechanically navigated the maze to the bench in front of number 1377. The detective side of her brain registered a heavy pair of footsteps approximatly twenty to thirty feet away, but the human side said to ignore it.

While rummaging around in her bag to find her wallet, Lindsay's mental block wore down and allowed event from the day to filter in. Danny. Daniel. Once a pleasant name, associated with lion's dens, the occasional shot of whiskey after a long day of work, and her favorite cousin on her mother's side. Now it meant only snide comments, stereotypes, and the inevitable nickname - Montana.

With the wallet located and the small green Post-It Note in hand, Lindsay stared at the monster of a locker and almost sighed. _In this technologically advanced day and age, you have no right to sigh at every little difficulty you face. Now when I was a young girl... _Shut up, Great Aunt Mary. Please. Right to 36, left past 36 to 27, right to 15. Pull. Click. Nothing.

Memories of high school and her bonding with the school janitor because of frequent locker trouble came flooding back... in the unwanted sort of way. Banging on the locker with all the strength her five six frame could summon, she tried it again. Spin, double spin, click. Nothing. Where a loud POP should have been, a small empty click reigned supreme.

The phone brought her back from memory lane and into a new horror. The phone sang on defiently as she dumped the contents of her khaki messenger bag onto the floor and ran her fingers frantically through a few notebooks, her badge, a wallet, pictures, and a paperback for the subway. I'M A REDNECK WOMAN, I AIN'T NO HIGH CLASS BROAD... Oh, no. Ohnnnnoooo... Footsteps equals person, heavy person equals male, current location equals male New Yorker, and current location and time equals Danny. The math stumbled around in Lindsay's head as she silently cursed and opened and shut her phone as quickly as possible. Tears slipped out freely, and her only goal was to get out without seeing anyone, but goals were dashed into pieces as she heard the footsteps get louder and louder and stop just outside her line of vision because of her position on the ground on her hands and knees.

The owner of the dirty Converse, the only part of his body she could see at the moment, bent down and got some things from underneath the lockers where she couldn't reach. Lindsay sneaked a look and caught a glimpse of a dark blue sweatshirt and a head of short black hair. He gently took the bag from her frozen hands and placed the paperback and the notebook inside and helped her to her feet. Phone clutched in one hand, Post-It Note in the other, Detective Lindsay Monroe felt two feet tall next to this giant.

"Detective Flack," she said distrustfully, finally matching a name with a somewhat familiar face. She'd seen this guy hanging around with Messer, and right now, any friend of Messer was no friend of Lindsay's.

"Monroe," he countered, unsure of the reason behind the hostility he found in her voice. The dark blue Converse, regular blue jeans, and sweatshirt declaring the wearer to be the proud owner of an NYPD badge would have made him look like a high schooler if he had not been a whole eight inches taller than Lindsay. "So you like Gretchen Wilson."

"No." _Way to go, Monroe. There are a million insults he could have used but didn't, and you just had to be a jerk, didn't you?_

"Okay." _You're such an idiot, Flack. What a lame thing to say. Okay... What is this, high school all over again? _

"My friend, Carrie... she knows I hate this song, so I guess she switched it last time I saw her. And then she called me, knowing I would be at work... I'm going to kill her." Lindsay sank down on the bench and was surprised when he sat down next to her, still holding her bag carefully, as if it had a bomb in it or something. She reached over and took it for him, and smiled when he relaxed noticably without it in his hands.

"Messer did the same thing to me once. Changed my ringtone to "Toxic" and called me at a wedding. Embarrassed the heck out of me in front of my whole extended family." He noticed how she was paying attention, and continued on in a lighter tone. "Of course, I changed his to Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel Like a Woman" and called him in the middle of the annual NYPD ball. Now, that was fun."

She stopped herself from snorting at the picture in her head, and asked hopefully, "Did you get it on tape?"

"Of course. Couldn't let such a golden oppertunity get away from me, could I? I wouldn't sit too close to me, though. It was a month ago, and he still hasn't gotten me back. I'm expecting a bucket of some science experiment on my head at any moment."

"You don't trust scientists?"

"Not on my life. But I got more connections in the Department than Messer's got, so I'm already planning my next move. You want in on it?" He judged from her expression whenever he mentioned Messer that she would be more than willing to do whatever it took to make him miserable, so Flack was surprised when she shook her head. "How are you holding up here in New York?"

"You're the first person to ask me that, you know?" she said somewhat spitefully.

"Even Stella?"

"Besides Stella. She's just naturally nice, it's in her personality."

"So you think New Yorkers generally aren't nice?"

"No, I didn't mean that. I hardly know any New Yorkers, so it's kind of hard for me to say something like that quite yet."

Lindsay backtracked as quickly as possible, and was still talking when he cut in with a smile and, "Hey, I'm offended. You still haven't answered my question. How are you holding up?"

"Can I tell you a secret?" She flushed when she realized how stupid that sounded, and started backtracking again. "No, what a third grade thing to say. Never mind."

"If you tell me a secret, I'll tell you a secret." He said it so lightly she thought he was making fun of her until he finished. "Seriously, you gotta tell somebody, and I can guarrantee you don't want to talk to the department shrink. He smells like tuna."

"Tuna?" she said, crinkling up her nose and tilting her head to the side. "Gross. Okay, I just kind of feel like a traitor to my family. I like New York way better than I liked Montana. That's my big secret." Lindsay stood up and started working on her locker again.

"Hey! You don't want to hear my secret? I kinda relates to yours."

"Shoot." Flack saw that Lindsay was having trouble with her locker so he got up, glanced at the combo on the Post-It, and with a few twists of the fingers and a hand chop a few inches above where hers had been, the lock gave a jubilant POP and sprang open.

"Well, when the year before I was in fourth grade, I went to stay with my cousins in Boston for the summer. And we went to a baseball game, White Sox Red Sox."

"So?"

"I... kind of... in my head...rootedfortheRedSox." Flack said quickly, and ducked his head waiting for her reaction.

Lindsay laughed at his guilty expression, and said between gasps for breath, "Would you repeat that please?"

He shook his head violently and muttered, "I've only said that once out loud in my entire life, and it ain't happening again."

"So you like the Red Sox better than the Yankees?"

"I NEVER said that, don't you ever tell people that or I swear..."

"You're right, that does relate to my story."

"I'll deny it if you tell anybody I said that."

"I thought police were honest?"

"We are. Just not about things that could get us murdered in our beds."

"So I hear they got great hot dogs at Fenley. Is that right, Flack?"

"Would you quit it! I never said they were better than here..." They walked together towards the exit, Lindsay's tears forgotten. Oh, yeah. Flack was good.


	2. Two Negatives

Everybody knows that a negative times a negative equals a positive.

-----

Adam Ross was not the lucky kind of guy. He was too scientific to believe in Friday the Thirteenth, broken mirrors, black cats, and seeing the bride on the wedding day. He didn't give a crap about living on the first floor of his apartment building, having been born on the first day of the month, or being the proud owner of a so-black-you'd-think-she's-blue cat appropriately named Joker.

But he did notice some things, when his head wasn't stuck in a book. Breaking a neighbor's window on his very first (and last) homer, accidentally switching the bulk-sized bottle of food coloring for bulk-sized bottle of shampoo. Catching chicken pox the day before his senior prom. The list ran on and on.

The consequences, some big, some small, were always borne with quiet acceptance on the outside with steaming fury coursing through his veins inside. Fury from saving up his minuscule allowance for months to pay for that window, watching the entire grocery store snicker at him as he bought dirty blond hair dye with a head full of neon green hair, and having to call his first ever date to cancel it had to go somewhere. It went into his passion - lab science.

Adam figured, if you're stuck in a lab all day, how hard will it be to mess up? He carried the very large and very full bucket through the doors of the locker room, and speed-walked his way in the direction of his locker, not knowing how clueless he had been.

-----

Jennifer Angell wasn't the most coordinated person in the world. Her parents first noticed it when she was in Kindergarten and couldn't do a proper somersault. It was dismissed first as regular for a child of her age, that their little Angel would grow out of it sometime soon. She didn't. It got worse. Diagnosed with poor vision in the third grade, Jen's startling ability to trip on everything was finally explained, and the acquisition of the coke-bottle glasses improved her sense of balance.

They came with three prices attached: the actual money paid to the optician, the ridicule of her peers, and the glasses amazing ability to fall off and lose themselves. Graded basketball games turned into fast-paced missile ducking with the ultimate target being her glasses. English was public humiliation, having to explain to the teacher and the prying ears of students why she couldn't read Act I, Scene 3 of Julius Caesar in front of the class - because "I, I dropped my glasses when I came through and I couldn't find them."

"Surely you can at least try, Jennifer."

"I, I can't, sir. I'm - almost - legally blind." Standing there listening to her entire Advanced Sophomore English class crawl around on their hands and knees, and hearing the snide comments as Will Sparks finally placed them in her outstretched arms a full five minutes later.

This had all changed after the purchasing of contacts the summer before her Freshman year in college. Minor problems with klutziness still occurred when the contacts would slip off into the corner of her eyes and in the nightly search for the bed when Jen removed the saviors in the bathroom right before going to sleep. Her job as a detective for the NYPD would have been nightmarish without the contacts, but there wasn't anything to worry about anymore, she thought as she walked through the rows of lockers with an open bottle of contact cleanser in one hand and the itchy offender on the tip of her index finger. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

-----

Contact was inevitable; lack of luck and lack of coordination and sight were not a good combination. Jen ran straight into Adam's chest, knocking the bucket high into the air and spraying the contents all over the lockers, bench, and their sprawling bodies. Her Kontacts Kleanser spun like a football and landed with surprising precision in the trash can. Adam watched in horror as the tiny dome-shaped contact dropped from Jen's index finger to the mess below.

He tried to speak first, but the words 'sorry', 'excuse me', and 'oops' left his head and all he could do is gape. Detective Jennifer Angell calmly wiped away the stickiness from her eyes and looked around herself, sizing up the situation. Red was everywhere. High velocity blood spatter on the lockers, bench, and themselves. She looked like she had been shot, sitting in a pool of what could have passed for very thick blood. The only thing that was wrong with the picture of homicide was that she was laughing as hard as she possibly could.

Jen caught sight of the label on the bucket and the confused look on the lab rat's face, and laughed harder. She tried to stand up, but slid down further, getting her clothes even dirtier and making her laugh harder. His look evolved from confusion to mirth, and he too started to smile, then threw his head back and howled.

Her fit ended first, and she managed to force out, "Didn't know ketchup came in a bucket," before intentionally sliding down onto her back and continuing until there were tears in her eyes. He recovered, then stood up carefully and scooped her up into his arms and plopped her down onto the bench.

"I buy everything in bulk.It's cheaper." he said as seriously as possible, then sat up with a start as she poked him in the side. "What the frick, Detective?"

"I don't have any extra clothes here. And I lost one of my contacts. And the janitor's gonna be really mad at us."

They looked each other up and down and Adam sighed. "I live a few blocks away from here." They squelched out of the locker room together and through a long hallway, passing Mac and rendering him, for once in his life, speechless.


End file.
